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Thursday, 6 October 2016

Westminster Student Blog Series

We will be posting a series of blogs written by University of Westminster Postgraduate students. They are all based on their research of social media, and come with a YouTube video as well. We will be posting one a week for the next month, so keep your eyes peeled!Ethics
& Democratising Facets of Digital Media

Oshin Mehta (@Osh88) is a
marketing manager by profession and a Postgraduate Scholar at University of
Westminster. She’s a tech enthusiast, who happily shares her exploration
traversing the wilds of digital media.

The book “Media, Society, World” has
attempted to highlight the implications of media rituals and its sway with
respect to multiculturalism as well as the outburst of digital media. Digital
media has allowed young people to frame their identities in a completely
different way than the previous generation. However, media practice theory
being the most conceptualized contribution of the book has raised important
questions, such as: “What are people doing with media in context to how we
act?” This issue is not solely confined to just social ‘identity’ but it also
draws attention to the fact that everything is available to everyone online.
This not only jeopardises the autonomy of young people when it comes to them
exploring or making mistakes, in some cases it even promotes the gap between
their online and offline identities. Conversely, it wouldn’t be right to
exclude them from the digital space either as this is the space where we act.

As Danah Boyd recently stated in The World Economic Forum “the constant sense
of connection is both empowering and utterly confusing.” This is why, there is
an even bigger need now for ethical stances in digital media. Digital ethics in
a broader sense deals with the impact of digital Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) on our societies and the environment at large. The
conception of ethics in media did not transpire as strongly until a few years
ago when issues of privacy, identity and exposure were brought up especially
with regards to the digital youth. However, in the recent years there has been
a prescriptive turn in the head of ethics. Scholars like Sherry Turkle and
Jaron Lanier who were celebratory supporters of the internet have now stirred
up ethical concerns about the quality of lives we are leading with media, where
we have become objects to each other online. The main-hamper affair is that we
are functioning in a world that is so deeply saturated with media including the
media that we generate ourselves. Jaron Lanier who is one of the inventors of
the virtual reality has highlighted a similar concern in his book ”You Are Not
a Gadget” which focuses on the inferences of “cybernetic totalism”. The ethical
predicament is that these media issues are very new to us and they demand a
radical shift in thinking of what each of us does as an actor in this media
space.

The book “Media, Society, World” has addressed another significant issue of
voice in media ethics which is, with media cultures no longer being confined in
territorial terms “How can we expect everyone to listen to everyone else?” The
subject of democratising voice in media needs to be further explored in media
studies and by media institutions as it is now intolerable to live in a society
with the suppression of voice. Therefore, with the advancement of Web 2.0, the
notion of media needs to be further analysed to interpret how it can rightly
fit into the world we live in.

References:
Couldry, N. (2012). Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media
Practice. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity.
James, C. (2009). Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media: A Synthesis
from the Good Play Project (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Reports on Digital Media and Learning). Edition. The MIT Press.
Lanier, J. (2010). The Noosphere Is Just Another Name for Everyone’s Inner
Troll. In: You Are Not a Gadget. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
p52.

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About NSMNSS

Should social science researchers embrace social media and, if we do, what are the implications for our methods and practice? This network, led by NatCen Social Research and SAGE along with our affiliate supporters (see below) is for people using or seeking to use social media in social science research who want to explore the implications of that question.